Notes from WeAreDevelopers 2025

WeAreDevelopers World Congress took over Messe Berlin this week — the event's tenth anniversary, with around 15,000 developers and tech leaders, and close to 500 talks across 16 stages. Living in Berlin, this one is a home game for me, and it's the best yearly snapshot of where our industry's head is at.

The agenda was an AI agenda

Officially the tracks covered software architecture, DevOps, security, APIs, developer experience and open source. In practice, one topic ran through everything: AI in software engineering — agentic AI, coding assistants, AI standards and what they do to the craft.

Highlights worth the ticket

• Thomas Dohmke (GitHub CEO) on AI as an autopilot for software development — letting developers spend their attention on high-level problems. His closing line stuck with me: "The world has won if we generate happy, human developers."
• Prashanth Chandrasekar (Stack Overflow CEO) on what AI-assisted answers mean for the world's biggest developer community.
• Katrin Lehmann (CIO, Mercedes-Benz) on software-defined vehicles — enterprise-scale engineering meeting consumer product expectations.
• NVIDIA on scaling laws — how AI performance keeps improving with compute, and why reasoning models push the curve further.

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My read after three days: the tooling is changing faster than the fundamentals. The talks that resonated most weren't about any specific model — they were about judgment, taste and team craft. Same as it ever was, with better autocomplete.